Networking vendor Adara is branching out beyond government IT further into health care to allow hospitals to provide end-to-end compatibility for patient data.

Adara Networks, a vendor that has provided
IT services to the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, is targeting
the health care space with its end-to-end virtualization offerings.
The
company manufactures enterprise service buses, which allow compatibility among
software applications in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and lead to
interoperability for electronic health records (EHRs).

A
major
trend to watch in health care, virtualization could help health care
organizations achieve government requirements such as moving to the
International Statistical Classification of Diseases 10 (ICD 10) diagnosis code
for medical claims, according to Adara CEO Eric Johnson.

The
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) requires that all medical claims
include ICD-10 codes instead of ICD-9 beginning Oct. 1, 2013.
Adara
provides virtualization services to Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), a
major health care system in Nashville, Tenn., which is a growing
area for health care IT.
HCA
uses Adara's Taurus Series Secure Communication Gateway (SCG), which provides
transparent deployment and automation as well as interoperability for both
secure and nonsecure communication protocols.
Meanwhile,
the Orion Series SOA-based platform enables EHR databases in hospitals to be
compatible. The Echo Series platform allows companies to create new software
applications and view EHRs on a virtual platform.
Adara
also helps health care organizations prioritize network traffic and enable
on-demand scalability.
Through
virtualization, the health care industry can achieve interoperability similar
to that of the financial industry, according to Johnson.
"The
way data center virtualization helps is to have a totality of information
available for the delivery of patient care," Johnson told eWEEK. "We need to make many
resources look and feel like one health care system."
Virtualization
can allow for a total exchange of data among all physicians a patient may see,
along with easier sharing of medical records and images. With total sharing of
information, vital tests won't get missed, Johnson suggested.
"Subsets
of information usually will result in suboptimal care-things like adverse
events," Johnson said. "When it's not a totality system, patients get
improperly diagnosed or get diagnosed over a protracted period, costs of
delivering health care go up, and patient health care goes down."
On
Sept. 28, Imprivata released a report, "2011 Virtualization Trends in
Healthcare," revealing that the health
care industry is likely to lead in desktop virtualization adoption over the
next year.
In
a virtualized infrastructure, multiple health care storage resources will
appear like one resource, Johnson said.
"We
need to have it at the server level, the actual machine level," he
explained. "Each of those machines has to look and feel like one large computing
and computational storage resource."
Through
a partnership with distributor Tech
Data, Adara virtualizes health care platforms from multiple vendors,
including EHR applications and picture archiving and communication systems
(PACS), along with enterprise service buses and virtual machines from companies
such as VMware.
VMware's
Sphere and View virtual desktop infrastructure runs off of Dell's
Mobile Clinical Computing platform as well as Meditech's EHR applications.
Mobile Clinical Computing allows doctors to run clinical applications on
tablets such as the Apple iPad or Dell Streak tablet in a secure, virtual
environment.
Virtualization
allows health care organizations to focus more on care than on making multiple
databases work together, according to Johnson.
"The
systems work seamlessly together and talk seamlessly together with security and
access controls, so when the doctor sits down, all the information from all the
data centers is virtualized information," Johnson said.

Brian T. Horowitz is a freelance technology and health writer as well as a copy editor. Brian has worked on the tech beat since 1996 and covered health care IT and rugged mobile computing for eWEEK since 2010. He has contributed to more than 20 publications, including Computer Shopper, Fast Company, FOXNews.com, More, NYSE Magazine, Parents, ScientificAmerican.com, USA Weekend and Womansday.com, as well as other consumer and trade publications. Brian holds a B.A. from Hofstra University in New York.